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Copywork
About This Passage
This portrait of Katharine is central because Orwell lets a noble outward form collapse into inner emptiness, making her a living example of what the Party can do to a mind. The pivot on 'until' and the piled adjectives 'stupid, vulgar, empty' give the passage strong value for studying reversal, syntax, and judgment.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: Winston writes in his secret diary, trying to push out a painful memory, and confronts a chilling truth, that in his world your own body can be your worst enemy, since a twitch or a word spoken in your sleep could give you away; he recalls a man in the street whose face suddenly twitched and felt certain that man was 'done for'; he reflects that the Party does not merely forbid disloyalty but works to drain private life of love and feeling, permitting marriage only without attraction and treating having a child as 'our duty to the Party'; he remembers his wife Katharine, whose mind held 'not a thought... that was not a slogan'; and even after confessing it all to his diary, he finds the act 'made no difference.' When you reach Winston's sense that even private feeling has become a kind of rebellion, slow down and weigh why a total state would set out to govern what its people feel.
Discussion Questions
- Winston reflects that the Party's true aim is not only to stop people forming loyalties it cannot control, but to drain private life of love and feeling itself. Why might a regime treat private love and feeling as a threat to its power, and what does that suggest about how total its control aims to be? Support your reading with the text.
- Katharine speaks in slogans and treats marriage as 'our duty to the Party,' while Winston records this painful memory in his diary instead of letting it disappear. What does the contrast between them reveal about what the Party can shape in a person and what it still struggles to control, and why? What part of the chapter points you there?
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Vocabulary
Item 1
not openly stated or admitted; the Party's real, undeclared purpose is to drain private life of feeling, a goal it pursues without ever announcing it.
Item 2
impossible to enter, capture, or overcome; conditioning has left the Party's women impregnable, walled off from natural feeling exactly as the Party intended.
Item 3
so tightly tangled that it cannot be separated out; in Winston's mind the past is inextricably bound up with dread, shame, and fear.
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Critical Thinking
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